The University of Mississippi Medical Center is meeting with aspiring nurses and other residents who want to work in the healthcare field to alleviate the hospital’s staffing shortages. In years past, the center would have around 30 vacancies for nurses at a given time, but the pandemic exacerbated burnout among workers. Now there are around 200 open positions, says Adrienne Murray who helps with nurse hirings at UMMC.
“The operating room is extremely difficult to hire into, you just don’t have a lot of experienced nurses out there,” says Murray. “We do hire nurse grads into almost all of our areas, but the challenge we’re coming in to is having enough preceptors to train them.”
At the height of the pandemic, hospital officials sounded the alarm on staffing shortages. They said there were enough beds to care for patients, but not enough nurses to care for them.
Abigail May is a current student at UMMC and will graduate at the end of the month. She’s one of the dozens who interviewed and has accepted a position as a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit.
May says “There definitely is a nursing shortage, but one thing that I like about UMMC is that we all work as a team. No one gets left behind. So I’m nervous and excited to be able to make a difference in my patients' lives. I’m a little nervous because I’m brand new starting off in the ICU, but I know that my fellow nurses and my respiratory therapist and physicians will all have my back and make sure that I don’t stumble along the way.”
Experts say there are accelerated education programs available for those with degrees in other fields but would like to make a career change to nursing.
